2012 was the best year in the firm's history. Strategic
Discipline's focus on priorities, meetings and metrics made a significant
the difference in our ability to achieve our targets.

Scott Ford, Cornerstone Wealth Management Group ~
Hagerstown, MD

The difference we've seen compared to other business
development processes within a very short period of time, in some cases
within days or even hours is you end up with actual work product,
deliverable plans and agendas that help.

Scott Bennett, Nations Financial Group ~ Cedar
Rapids, IA

Doug's Four Decisions Workshop has allowed our company
to focus on our top priorities for the year. With the use of the 1 page
strategic plan, company and individual dashboards we are better able to
track performance and measure results. For the first time we have a clear
company goal with everyone working towards that common goal. We are
extremely excited to continue working with Doug in the future.

Daily Huddles are by far the best thing we've learned.
Lots of our operations decisions have been made through the use of the daily
huddle process. Having four daily huddles each day is a pain, yet it's the
most productive and best thing that's happened to me as a manager.

Burges Kerawalla ~ Autopia Car Wash, Fremont, CA

Just wanted to let you know our first Supper Huddle
was a huge success!! Your help certainly was beneficial in its success!!
Thanks again for all of your help!!!.

Tyna, Charge Team ~ JPMA

In 2013, in addition to growing sales dollars and
market share, we cut our return beer rate (ROR) by over 35%. Nearly $600,000
less beer was double handled and brought back to the warehouse by your
efforts. This improvement drove the revenue and gross margin numbers up, as
well as helped considerably in reducing warehouse, merchandising, and
delivery costs.

Strategic Discipline Blog

The Pace of Change is requiring you and your staff to maintain a constant awareness of the marketplace. It is necessary to have your antennae attuned to every opportunity.

For twenty plus years I was in the radio business. As a sales person, sales manager, general manager, and owner I couldn’t go into any environment in my community where I wasn’t constantly aware of the advertising that was going on. Advertising revenue drove the success of our business so I was always watching, listening and perusing the media for who was advertising where. Too frequently I would ask why isn’t this advertiser using our audience.

Today every business owner needs to have this type of receiver scanning to gather and collect information on their competition and the environmental changes that might affect their business.

How do you do this? Why is this so important?

First you need to understand that as human beings we are equipped with the ability to recognize changes. In fact the number one capability of our brains is pattern recognition. The problem is that if we only see a pattern once a year or less frequently we are unable to distinguish the patterns that are occurring.

Interject the Strategic Discipline of Meeting Rhythms and suddenly you begin to appreciate the value of collecting customer and employee feedback on a weekly basis. Weekly meetings provide the receptor to engage your people in discussions and collection on what they are hearing, seeing, feeling in the market and with their fellow employees.

Most of us are capable of getting out of the way of an approaching semi if we are in the street and the truck is several blocks away. If you see your meeting rhythms and the customer and employee feedback agenda from the our weekly Rockefeller Habits meetings as this semi heading toward you then you can avert any potential disasters in plenty of time. Consequently the positives you hear can also offer opportunities. The key is to recognize the patterns as they emerge.

The book Strategic Learning points out there is a point where the signal [opportunity or threat] is strongest and thus is most often too late. Picking up a signal when it is obvious to everyone else gives you no advantage. You want to sharpen your antennae to capture weak signals, so that you have time to decide on the best course of action.

You need a system that captures signals like these so you can be in advance of your competition and the marketplace. We teach our coaching clients that the two indispensible keys to leadership are forecasting and delegating.

The horse that wins is often no more than a few tenths of a second faster than its nearest competitor. The advantage you can have by being first to recognize the signals in the marketplace can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Has your business developed the discipline for meeting rhythms in order to capture this key capability of the human mind? Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize winning Hungarian bio-chemist heralded, “Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” You must recognize the critical importance of developing insights earlier and better than your competition. It’s just one of the five “killer competencies” to building an adaptive enterprise that thrives in the current fast pace environment.

We’ll review these Five Killer Competencies from Strategic Learning in my next blog.